Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Massachusetts, Maryland, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Rhode Island and Washington, D.C., will receive grants, department spokesman Justin Hamilton said. The amounts for each state were expected to be announced later.

The aim of the historic program is to reward ambitious changes to improve schools and close the achievement gap. The competition instigated a wave of reforms across the country, as states passed new teacher accountability policies and lifted caps on charter schools to boost their chances of winning.

Tennessee and Delaware were named winners in the first round of the competition in March, sharing $600 million. The applicants named winners Tuesday will share a remaining $3.4 billion. Another $350 million is coming in a separate competition for states creating new academic assessments.

The historic program, part of President Obama’s economic stimulus plan, rewards states for embarking on ambitious reforms to improve struggling schools, close the achievement gap and boost graduation rates.

“New York’s schools have made strong strides toward excellence and this grant will accelerate that progress,” said U.S. Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., who met with Education Secretary Arne Duncan on New York’s proposal. “This is great news for parents, teachers, and taxpayers across the state.”

Thirty-five states and the District of Columbia applied for the second round of the competition. The Education Department named 19 applicants finalists in July.

More than a dozen states vying for the money changed laws to foster the growth of charter schools, and at least 17 reformed teacher evaluation systems to include student achievement. Dozens also adopted Common Core State Standards, the uniform math and reading benchmarks developed by the Council of Chief State School Officers and the National Governors Association.

“The change unleashed by conditioning federal funding on bold and forward-looking state education policies is indisputable,” the Democrats for Education Reform said in a statement. “Under the president’s leadership, local civil rights, child advocacy, business and education reform groups, in collaboration with those state and local teacher unions ready for change, sprung into action to achieve things that they had been waiting and wanting to do for years.”

In a speech announcing the finalists last month, Duncan called the change a “quiet revolution.”

Between both rounds of the competition, a total of 46 states and the District of Columbia applied.

While the program has been praised for instigating swift reforms, the competition for many states was an uphill battle, with teacher unions hesitant to sign on to reforms directly tying teacher evaluations to student performance on standardized tests, and education leaders concerned winning meant giving up too much local control.

A number of states that did not win the competition said they still planned to proceed with the reforms they had proposed, though they acknowledged change would take place at a slower pace.

9 states, D.C. receive ‘Race to the Top’ education funds

Education Department officials provided The Associated Press with a list of the finalists ahead of a speech by Education Secretary Arne Duncan.

The states are: Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Illinois, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and South Carolina.

Duncan was expected to officially announce the finalists at a speech at the National Press Club.

The competition rewards ambitious reforms aimed at improving struggling schools and closing the achievement gap. Applications were screened by a panel of peer reviewers, and finalists will travel to Washington in coming weeks to present their proposals.

In all, 35 states and the District of Columbia applied for the second round of the application. The 19 finalists have asked for $6.2 billion, though only $3.4 billion is available.

Dozens of states passed new education policies to make themselves more attractive to the judges.

New York, which was a finalist in the first round but did not win money, lifted its cap on the number of charter schools that can open annually from 200 to 460. Colorado passed laws that would pay teachers based on student performance and can strip tenure from low performing instructors.

Two states, Tennessee and Delaware, were awarded a total of $600 million in the first round.

Their applications were praised for merit pay policies that link teacher pay to student performance and for garnering the support of teachers’ unions. Tennessee and Delaware also have laws that are welcoming to charter schools.

In the first round of the race, some stakeholders were reluctant to support applications tying teacher evaluations to student test scores.

Armario reported from Miami. AP Writer Michael Gormley in Albany, N.Y., contributed to this report.

18 states, D.C. named Race to the Top education grant finalists

Eighth-graders should understand the Pythagorean theorem. And by high school graduation, all U.S. students should be ready for college or a career.

That’s the goal of sweeping new education benchmarks released Wednesday called the Common Core State Standards, a project that aims to replace a hodgepodge of educational goals varying wildly from state to state with a uniform set of expectations for students. It’s the first time states have joined together to establish what students should know by the time they graduate high school.

“With these standards, we can provide all of the country’s children with the education they deserve,” said West Virginia schools superintendent Steve Paine, who gathered with other educators and officials from across the country at Peachtree Ridge High School in Suwanee just outside Atlanta to release the final draft of the standards. “Having consistent standards across the states means all of our children are going to be prepared for college and career, regardless of zip code.”

States are expected to use the standards to revise their curriculum and tests to make learning more uniform across the country, eliminating inequities in education not only between states but also among districts. The standards also will ensure students transferring to a school district in a different state won’t be far behind their classmates or have to repeat classes because they are more advanced.

Under Common Core, third-graders should understand subject-verb agreement, fifth-graders need to know about metaphors and similes and seventh-graders must understand how to calculate surface area. States that sign up are supposed to use the standards as a base on which to build their curricula and testing, but they can make their benchmarks tougher than Common Core.

All but two states — Alaska and Texas — signed on to the original concept of Common Core more than a year ago.

Critics worry that the standards will basically nationalize public schools rather than letting states decide what is best for their students. Texas’ commissioner of education, Robert Scott, has said that the state didn’t sign on to Common Core because it wants to preserve its “sovereign authority to determine what is appropriate for Texas children to learn in its public schools.”

So far, the standards have been adopted by Kentucky, Hawaii, Maryland, West Virginia and Wisconsin. Another 40 states and Washington, D.C., have agreed to adopt the standards in coming months, said Gene Wilhoit, executive director of the Council of Chief State School Officers, which joined with the National Governors Association in leading the Common Core project.

“We don’t think it’s acceptable that because a student lives down in Atlanta and not up here, they should have different outcomes,” said Wilhoit before Wednesday’s event in the northern Atlanta suburbs.

The federal government was not involved but has encouraged the project, including adoption of the standards as part of the scoring in the U.S. Department of Education‘s “Race to the Top” grant competition. President Barack Obama has said he wants to make money from Title I — the federal government’s biggest school aid program — contingent on adoption of college- and career-ready reading and math standards.

“As the nation seeks to maintain our international competitiveness, ensure all students regardless of background have access to a high quality education and prepare all students for college, work and citizenship, these standards are an important foundation for our collective work,” Education Secretary Arne Duncan said Wednesday in a prepared statement.

Common Core was structured over a year of meetings with teachers, parents, school administrators, civil rights leaders, education policymakers, business leaders and others from across the country. The group produced multiple drafts and collected comments from more than 10,000 people online.

“The world is small now, and we’re not just competing with students in our county or across the state. We are competing with the world,” said Robert Kosicki, who graduated from a Georgia high school this year after transferring from Connecticut and having to repeat classes because the curriculum was so different.

“This is a move away from the time when a student can be punished for the location of his home or the depth of his father’s pockets.”

States to establish nationwide standards for students, teachers

But as she watched him struggle for years — many mornings prying him out of bed and forcing him to go to school — Williams sought an alternative to the traditional classroom. The single mother now drives about 140 miles roundtrip each day to her 12-year-old son’s charter school in Sandpoint.

“It’s killing my poor little car, but it is so worth the drive to me,” Williams said in a telephone interview. “He was not getting the education he needed.”

Williams would like a closer alternative, but Idaho allows just six new charter schools a year.

Several other states also put strict limits on the number of new charter schools. Another 11 states don’t allow charters at all, even though the federal government has created a $4.35 billion competition to encourage charters and other educational innovations.

Most states adopted only modest measures to improve charter schools as a result of the “Race to the Top” competition and no new substantive charter school laws were passed, said Jeanne Allen, president and founder of the Center for Education Reform, a school choice advocate based in Washington, D.C.

“I can’t tell you how much I wish Race to the Top would have created a firestorm,” Allen said. “The reality is, it didn’t.”

Charter schools get taxpayer money but have more freedom than traditional public schools do to map out how they’ll meet federal education benchmarks. They are arguably more popular than ever, with a record 5,000 operating in 39 states and the District of Columbia, serving more than 1.5 million children. About 300,000 children are on waiting lists.

Charter schools draw fire from teachers’ unions and other education groups, who say taxpayer money should be spent to fix traditional public education system rather than creating schools that have less oversight from state and local officials.

Alabama’s politically powerful teachers’ union helped kill a bill — introduced by Gov. Bob Riley in response to Race to the Top earlier this year — that would have allowed charter schools.

“The dollars we do have need to go into the classrooms of schools we’re operating,” said Paul Hubbert, executive director of the Alabama Education Association.

States qualify for Race to the Top money based on a scoring system that gives states with charter schools a significant advantage. Of the 500 points a state can receive, 40 are related to charter schools.

At the start of the competition, Education Secretary Arne Duncan went so far as to warn states that ban or restrict charter schools were jeopardizing their chances to win a slice of the money. But he backed off that threat, and many states, like Idaho, took that as a signal that they didn’t need to change their charter school laws.

A bill to allow more charter schools for certain groups of students — such as minorities or those with disabilities — to open each year was scuttled as the Idaho Legislature focused mostly on regular public schools, which face the worst budget year for public education in the state’s history.

The first Race to the Top grants were awarded in March to Tennessee, which received $500 million, and Delaware, which received $100 million. Both were lauded for their charter school laws among other attempts to improve education.

Tennessee expanded charter-school eligibility only in 2009. Louisiana, Illinois, Michigan and Massachusetts also eased or eliminated limits on charter schools in the past year.

North Carolina and New York are among states that, like Idaho, are holding tight to their caps on the specialized schools.

One state — Mississippi — let its charter school law expire last year. Mississippi lawmakers passed new legislation in late March that would allow low-performing schools to be restructured to become either charter schools or “new start” schools, both of which are designed to revamp management and increase parental involvement.

Applications for the second round of Race to the Top awards are due in June. Kentucky’s legislature is considering allowing charter schools, and Hawaii officials are considering easing charter restrictions as they vie for the federal funds.

“When you put money on the line and it’s the most difficult budget faced in years, people start listening for a variety of reasons,” said Todd Ziebarth with the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools.

Charter-school bandwagon avoided by some states

School districts around the country have the choice of whether to administer the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery exam, and ones that offer it typically pass the scores and students’ contact information directly to the military. Topics on the test range from math and reading to knowledge of electronics and automobiles.

The Maryland law, the first in the nation after similar California legislation was vetoed, was signed last month and bars schools from automatically releasing the information to military recruiters. Instead, students, and their parents if they are under 18, will have to decide whether to give the information to the military. The law takes effect in July. One other state, Hawaii, has a similar policy for its schools, but not a law.

Roughly 650,000 U.S. high school students took the exam in the 2008-2009 school year, and the Department of Defense says scores for 92% of them were automatically sent to military recruiters. In the fiscal year that ended in September, 7.6% of those who enlisted in the military used scores from the test as part of their applications.

Nancy Grasmick, Maryland Superintendent of Schools, said in a letter to lawmakers that the test and score analysis are “free services that public schools often utilize as part of their ongoing career development and exploration programs.” Grasmick took no position on the legislation in her letter and did not respond to a request for comment from The Associated Press.

Defense Department spokeswoman Eileen Lainez said the data is used both to screen students’ enlistment eligibility and to determine their interests and skills for nonmilitary careers. Asked about criticism that the military is going around parents, Lainez said in an e-mail that “parents and other influencers are in the best position to help advise students of various career opportunities, and the pros and cons associated with each of the choices.”

Members of the Maryland Coalition to Protect Student Privacy, which pushed for the legislation, argued the military isn’t upfront about the test’s real purpose. Coalition member and high school teacher Pat Elder said he became involved in the issue after volunteering on a phone hot line for troubled soldiers. Many told him they hadn’t considered the military until a recruiter who’d seen their scores contacted them.

“I’ve spoken to ‘C’ or ‘D’ students who are called by a recruiter and told ‘Dude, you’re really good at this kind of stuff,’ and that’s what it takes for them to join,” said Elder, who teaches at the Muslim Community School in Potomac, Md. “There is an insidious, psychological element to these tests.”

While Maryland is the first state to pass a law prohibiting the automatic release of scores to military recruiters, some individual school districts elsewhere, including the Los Angeles school system, have policies to the same effect. Hawaii’s Department of Education implemented its statewide policy last year. Four Maryland counties — Howard, Frederick, Montgomery and Prince George’s — also blocked the direct release of scores to recruiters before the state law was passed.

State legislators in California passed a similar measure in 2008, but it was vetoed by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.

School districts in Maryland have had different policies for when and how they administer the roughly 3.5 hour multiple-choice exam. Some school districts, like rural Allegany County, only offer the test to students at a technical high school, while individual schools in the Baltimore City district can choose whether to administer the exam.

Maryland state senator Jamie Raskin, D-Montgomery, said he sponsored the bill partly because school districts’ approaches varied. He said constituents also told him they didn’t think local school districts knew their options.

“They thought they had to turn over information to recruiters,” Raskin said.

Some argued that the measure was antimilitary. Baltimore County Republican Sen. Andy Harris said the legislation gives students the impression that they should be skeptical of military careers.

“I think sending any message while we’re at war overseas that the military in any way is not an honorable profession is the wrong message to send,” Harris said.

Del. Sheila Hixson, D-Montgomery, sponsored the bill in the House, bristled at that argument.

“For me, it wasn’t the military piece, it was the parental permission,” Hixson said. “Parents didn’t know what was going on and children didn’t realize what was going on.”

Toria Latnie, who now lives in Michigan, said a counselor at her son’s Florida charter high school told seniors in late 2008 that the military aptitude test was a requirement for graduation. Latnie researched the exam online and refused to allow her son to take the test.

“I was angry, very angry,” said Latnie, a mother of five. “I felt lied to, deceived, like people were trying to go behind my back and give my child’s private information to the military.”

Maryland 1st to bar schools releasing tests to military